Samurai Champloo: Sidetracked

As a whole, Samurai Champloo: Sidetracked is a surprisingly well done button masher which should be even more appealing to anime fans.

Provides an overall fun experience simply because of its reasonably fun combat system and its totally whacked out sense of humor.

Grasshopper Manufacture, best known for its work on the underappreciated "Killer 7," has done a great job capturing the essence of the show while incorporating its own signature elements, and the result is an entertaining hack and slash adventure that serves up plenty of action that's been marinated in tasty Samurai Champloo shenanigans.

A good game with a few bugs. If you're a fan of the anime series then you'll probably fall instantly in love with Sidetracked.

Sure, it does have some taxing level-design problems, but its presentation and sheer wackiness and randomness saves it from being just another statistic.

It's too bad Fuu isn't playable, other than a wacky mini-game where she gets to speed-eat, but then again, you'd probably just be doing a different mini-game where she gets kidnapped anyway.

Fans of the series will appreciate the games faithfulness to the show, but to everyone else, Sidetracked will just feel like an uglier version of countless games you've played before. [May 2006, p.101]

Sidetracked is a hard sell due to it just being so weird. Strange gameplay styles and psychedelia combine to make a game that is at once compelling and borderline offensive in its ways.

The lack of any camera control can be frustrating at times, leaving you with a less than optimal view of the action. [May 2006, p.78]

When you finally realize that most of your moves are going to be accessed by only two buttons with the occasional button-pushing mini games, it's likely to be game-over for most players.

Were it not for its creative direction's admirable job of filling in its patchy mechanics' gaps it would be entirely skippable. With those gaps filled it's a charming, if flawed, achievement. [June 2006, p.96]

Samurai Champloo: Sidetracked does a lot that's interesting - for a little while, anyway - but we get the impression that this is the product of too much thought and not enough work.